What is SEO? A Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the process of developing or tweaking your website for the search engine to understand, with the intention to achieve a high rank in search results. Once your website is developed, the most fundamental and essential thing you must worry about is to define your online marketing strategy. SEO is the first thing that you need to do on that regards.

SEO is nothing but of a set of tricks, guidelines and includes a massive amount of rich contents. Contents must unique, contextual containing popular/most searched keywords. As SEO deals mostly with rich text, it sometimes also understood as copywriting.

What is SEO Optimisation?

Following are some of the terms that well describes the SEO optimization techniques

SEO is all about optimising a website for Search Engines

SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results.

The intent of SEO is to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines.

SEO is one of online marketing strategy but not the only one.

Building SEO for your website needs the deep understanding of how different search algorithms works, what human visitors might search and what are the essential metadata’s that you must configure to let search engines find your website.

How Search Engine Works ?

Search engines perform various activities in order to deliver search results. Following are some of the activities that most of the leading search engines including Google and Yahoo do for better results.

Crawling – is the process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider. Google calls its crawler as Googlebot.

Indexing – is the process of creating an index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

Processing – When a search request comes, the search engine processes it . i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.

Relevancy Check – Since it is likely that more than one pages contain the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

Retrieving Results – The last step in search engines activities is retrieving the best-matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of times per month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift or something else outside of your control. Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between their relevancy algorithm lead to major changes in results relevancy.

What is SEO Copy Writing?

SEO Copywriting is the technique of writing the viewable rich text content on a web page in such a way that the search engine reads well. It should target specific search terms and keywords. Its purpose is to rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms.

As well as the viewable text, SEO Copywriting usually optimizes other on-page elements for the targeted search terms. These include the Title, Description and Keywords tags, headings and alt text.

The idea behind SEO Copywriting is that search engines want genuine content pages and not doorway pages that are created for cheating to gain search engine ranking.

What is Search Engine Rank?

When you search any keyword using a search engine then it displays thousands of results found in its database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results. If the Search engine is putting your web page on the first position then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as with a high rank.

Well, now that we understand what is SEO. Let’s think about how to build your website SEO. There are two ways you can plan to build your website SEO; On-Page SEO andOff-Page SEO building. In on page SEO, you need to include good content, good keywords and putting keywords on the right places, giving an appropriate title to every page etc. Off-Page SEO is all about link building. This means you need to increase the number of incoming links from reputed websites or by submitting your site to be indexed by open directories, search engines, link exchange etc.

SEO techniques are broadly classified into two categories; White Hat SEO and Black Hat or spamdexing. Techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design referred to as White Hat SEO, and Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of referred to as Black Hat or spamdexing.

White Hat SEO

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as White Hat if it follows the followings

If it comply to the search engine’s guidelines.

If it does not involves any deception. It ensures that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. It ensures that a Web Page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines. It ensures the good quality of the web pagesIt ensures the useful content available on the web pages

Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and don’t try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and definitely you will get something more.

Black Hat or Spamdexing

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it follows the followings

Try to improve rankings that are disapproved of by the search engines and/or involve deception. Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human-friendly. Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked.

Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO tactic.

Using Hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as “no frame” sections.

Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content. This is called Meta tag stuffing.

Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called Keyword stuffing .

Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway PagesMirror websites by hosting multiple websites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs.

Creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. This is called Page hijacking.

Always be a way to adopt any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above proprieties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything.